Wright asks two questions, which he poses as restating the same thing, which are actually very different things:
- What did Jesus mean when he said the kingdom of God was at hand?
- What did the average Galilean villager hear when a young prophet strode into town and announced that Israwl’s God was now at last becoming king? This is a common flaw I see in a lot of “new perspective” type writings, where there is a conflation of “what contemporaries would have understood’ vs. “what the message was” since misunderstanding is such a fundamental element of the initial gospel revelation.